The Revelations by Alex Preston Page A

to a range of mountains, a girl cried in her room, the film ended. Marcus stood up.
    ‘I’ve got to get to bed. It’s two. I can sleep for four hours. Five if I don’t go for a swim. Feel free to stay. Or go. I mean, do whatever.’
    Mouse looked up at him, stretched out his short legs and lit a cigarette. The twins woke at the same time and yawned, rubbing their eyes and smiling as colour crept back into their cheeks.
    ‘We have to leave now,’ said Lee suddenly. Her eyes were watery, red lines clustered in the milky corners. She groped on the floor for her bag, stumbled as she slipped on her heels and leaned over to place a wet kiss on Mouse’s lips. She stood back, grinning.
    ‘I’m shitfaced,’ she said proudly.
    Marcus felt very tired. ‘Bye, Lee. G’night, Mouse. Hang around as long as you like. There’s more booze in the kitchen.’
    He undressed in the spare room and walked down the hall in his boxer shorts to brush his teeth. Philip and Lee were already on their way out, his arm around her thin shoulders. Marcus realised that Philip hadn’t taken off the leather jacket all night. Lee turned and waved unsteadily as they left. Marcus looked into the sitting room, where Mouse and the twins were playing some sort of drinking game involving the last of the whisky and a pack of cards. Marcus nodded at them and turned back down the hall.
    Drunk, unthinking, he walked past the spare room towards his own bedroom. He opened the door and saw Abby sitting on the end of the bed, her shadow thrown across the room by the bedside lamp behind her. She was naked with her knees drawn up to her chest. She didn’t move when he came in. She was looking at herself in the ancient free-standing mirror that she had inherited from her grandmother. It was liver-spotted with age and misty in the corners. The white sheet beneath her was stained a deep red. She had stripped off the duvet and the blood had slowly spread out, soaking through to the mattress , and was now dripping where she sat at the foot of the bed, a single drop every few seconds that landed in a pool on the cream carpet with a noise like a ticking clock. She let out a sob.
    ‘Oh, Abby.’ He was suddenly sober.
    He went to the bathroom and found a towel. Very gently he lifted her to sit upon it. Then he climbed up behind Abby and placed his arms around her, looking at their reflection in the mirror. He saw a thin mist over her face; long-dried tear-tracks led down from her eyes. Neither of them moved for a long while. Then, very slowly, he helped her to stand, holding the towel in place. She watched as he stripped off the sheet and used the unstained corners to soak up the blood on the mattress. Holding the towel between her legs, Abby waddled to the other side of the bed. She lay down on the clean stretch of mattress and Marcus lifted the duvet over her, tucking it in tightly as his mother had done for him as a child. He found some painkillers in a bedside drawer and held the water glass as she swallowed them. Finally, he left the room to fill a hot-water bottle in the kitchen. By the time he returned she was already asleep. He pulled a chair beside the bed and sat watching her gentle breaths which hardly stirred the thick duvet cocoon. He placed the hot-water bottle at her feet. He heard Mouse and the twins leave, heard the girls’ high young voices in the street below.
    Marcus sat until the first fingers of light crept into the sky outside the window. A star shivered above the rooftops of the houses opposite, then faded into the dawn. Abby occasionally drew in the sharp yelped breaths of one who had recently been crying. Marcus smoothed his hand over her brow and mumbled soft words to her. He was still in his boxer shorts and he realised that he was very cold, his feet numb and clammy. Abby’s blood stained his fingers and was turning brown under his nails.
    Marcus had known Abby for so long that when he looked at her face it was not like looking at a real